Iaith a meddwl

Does the language we speak really affect the way we think?
Well, that’s been a hotly debated topic among scientists for almost a century – and it was one of the panel discussions at last week’s meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Among those who support the idea is Dr. John Lucy, a professor of human development and psychology at the University of Chicago.
Dr. Lucy has studied the Yucatec Maya people of Mexico for the past 3 decades. And he believes their language – which does not use any form of the plural for its nouns – actually causes them to think about the world in a completely different way from English speakers.

26.2.02

Welsh for Zen

Yet both bands have found a way to incorporate their national heritage into their music; both have recorded in Welsh, and often return to the language as a badge of pride as well as willful display of stubborn eccentricity and obscurantism. In a sense, the music they make is as much a part of their particular location as the Velvet Underground were to their own. The isolation of Wales mirrors the isolation of New York’s outsider scene of the late ’60s, enabling artists to gleefully make music free from the constraints of expectation.

21.2.02

Japanese grammer is not for the faint of heart or weak of mind. What’s more, the Japanese also do not have any words for “me”, “them”, “him, or “her” that anyone could use without being incredibly insulting (the Japanese word for “you”, for example, when written in kanji, translates to“I hope a monkey scratches your face off”). Because of this, the sentence “He just killed her!” and “I just killed her!” sound exactly the same, meaning that most people in Japan have no idea what is going on around them at any given moment. You are supposed to figure these things out from the “context”, which is a German word meaning “you’re screwed”.

19.2.02

Dydy pawb ddim yn siarad Saesneg, wedi’r cwbl

“The monopoly of the English language in the Internet world will soon be over,” says Elisabeth den Os, who led the EURESCOM project BabelWeb, which was finished last year. Researchers from the Netherlands, France, UK, Italy and Portugal co-operated in this project.
The work was based on the assumption that small businesses as well as large corporations have to be able to provide multilingual Web-based services. Research has shown that customers stay twice as long on Web sites in their native languages and buy three times as much. The demand for multilingual Web sites is therefore high, but designing them is difficult.

Actio dros bontydd ieithyddol

He came up with the idea when he realized he was having a tough time breaking into the French side of the business. Dunlevy speaks a fluent but accented French. On top of that, nobody in the French milieu knew who he was.
“I spoke with some of my (French-speaking) actor friends and realized they were experiencing the same thing in English,” Dunlevy said. “(In the majority of cases) as soon as you have an accent, you don't get the role.”

Llenyddiaeth mewn cymdeithasau marwaidd

Seeking to disagree with the Prime Minister on the plight of Indian writing in non-English languages, Naipaul said if the language authors had written great works, they would have become popular themselves.

Hanes y Gogleddwyr go iawn

And being ashore, vpon the toppe of a hill, he perceiued a number of small things fleeting in the Sea a farre off, whyche hee supposed to be Porposes, or Ceales, or some kinde of strange fishe: but comming nearer, he discouered them to be men, in small boates made of leather.

18.2.02

Datgloi iaith: yr allwedd hon neu’r agoriad hwnna?

Outside of English, many languages give nouns a gender, a grammatical distinction that linguists have long considered to be without any real meaning. But in 2000 Boroditsky found that the system subtly changes a speaker’s experience of everyday objects.
The word “key”, for example, is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. Boroditsky recruited two groups of volunteers, native German speakers and native Spanish speakers, who spoke English well. She then asked them to name three adjectives to describe objects.
She found a consistent pattern of German speakers using more masculine terms to describe the key - such as “hard, heavy, jagged” - while Spanish speakers favored more feminine descriptions, such as “golden, intricate, lovely.” Boroditsky said she is now considering studying how the design of bridges - a masculine word in Spanish, but a feminine word in German - differs between the two cultures.

Geiriau o’r byd newydd

Are the Welsh afraid of freedom? When James Callaghan's Labour government put the issue of limited self-rule to Wales, in 1979, voters trounced it by a ratio of four to one. Even the Welsh cited as reasons a historical strain of national timidity and a lack of self-confidence bred into the country through centuries of subservience. A visiting African journalist told a local reporter in 1997, “The colonial mentality is more firmly entrenched in your country than in any other I have been to.”

We have known race riots, draft riots, labor violence, secession, anti-war protests, and a whiskey rebellion, but one kind of trouble we've never had: a language riot. Language riot? It sounds like a joke. The very idea of language as a political force -- as something that might threaten to split a country wide apart -- is alien to our way of thinking and to our cultural traditions.

To some readers, John Cowper Powys is a long-winded, bombastic bore and an almost pathological celebrant of oddball sex and chthonic realms. To most, he is an unknown quantity. His name seldom comes up in discussions of that dreary academic figment known as The Novel, and a number of well-read people of my acquaintance have never heard of him.

However determined their study of an adoptive language, however thorough their immersion in it, they eventually reach a plateau. At a dinner party conducted in the nonnative tongue, for instance, they may contribute to the table talk, but the best they can aspire to be is a bore. In such situations, as Evelyn Waugh observed, “there is no platitude so trite that a highly educated foreigner will not bring it out with pride.”

Tavern signs advertised the availability of food, drink, and lodging, but they were also meant to entertain and, sometimes, to broadcast the tavern owner's political sympathies. The use of tavern signs to display political alliances accelerated during and after the Revolution. But in Dedham, Massachusetts, in the late 1740s, tavern owner, almanac writer, physician, and common lawyer Nathaniel Ames used his sign to skewer five of the province's most powerful politicians: the justices sitting on the Superior Court of Judicature, Massachusetts’ highest court of law.

If you wanted to change society, you weren’t going to do it by lecturing people -— you would do it by employing the artillery of pop culture itself to puncture the lumbering, humorless establishment, by using anarchic, prankish, lysergic humor to radicalize the hippies and humanize the radicals.

Gartre gyda tywysog y tywyllwch

13.2.02

Ecoleg a’r iaith

Dear Mr Davies,I note that your last cheque for £2.00 was written in Welsh. Our bank has agreed to accept it on this occassion, however I would point out that this could cause problemss if future cheques are sent in Welsh, especially if they are for larger amounts. I hope this does not cause you too much inconvenience.

Tynged yr Iaith - 40 mlynedd wedyn

Byw mewn byd Saesneg

Erkidjuk, an Iqaluit resident, speaks and reads Inuktitut. He’s picked up tidbits of English words during his 72 years. But he can’t read it.

The English words on food labels, business signs and household appliances are just letters to him: he doesn’t know what they mean.

In the bright, open kitchen in his Iqaluit apartment, caribou meat sits in a pot on the stove and there are pieces of bannock on the counter. Next to the bannock, there’s a white microwave.

Erkidjuk gestures to the appliance, focusing on the English words: "defrost," "entrees," "popcorn," he points out. "In some ways, it’s difficult not to read English. There are some items that don’t have Inuktitut words on them," he says.

Siaradwyr brodorol yn helpu achub ieithoedd brodorol

The Sahaptin words are the gateway to a language of their ancestors - a language that could die out in a generation if young people don't begin speaking it in their everyday lives.

``It was our children who got us motivated to trying the classes,'' said Michael Collins, an accountant who lives with his wife and family on the sprawling sage and juniper-dotted Warm Springs Reservation. ``Our little daughter at 2 1/2 knew more of the language than we did.''